Book Review

The Cambridge historian Eamon Duffy has a genius for recovering worlds we have lost. In 1992 he published the revisionist The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400­–1580, a gigantic and subtle work of historical anthropology and a best seller in the U.K., in which he revealed the pull and vitality of pre-Reformation English Catholicism. His meticulous and beguiling reconstruction, along with his exploration of the psychological and spiritual devastation caused by the Tudors’ wrecking of the physical culture of the late-medieval Church, demonstrated that the Reformation was “a great cultural hiatus, which had dug a ditch, deep and dividing, between the English people and their past”—a past that over merely three generations became a foreign country, impossible for the English to regard as their own. The book stirred the English popular and scholarly mind from a historical and cultural complacency bred of Protestant and Whiggish triumphal­ism. In Marking the Hours, Duffy has pulled off the near-impossible: He lets us penetrate—perforce fleetingly and partially—the inner lives of women and men who lived when the world was over half a thousand years younger.

The Stripping of the Altars drew on a dizzying array of sources and concentrated on the externals of medieval Chris­tian­ity: sacraments, altars, processions, images. In this far more tightly focused book, Duffy examines a small, concrete body of evidence in order to illuminate the history of prayer—which, he acknowledges, “is as difficult to write as the history of sex, and for some of the same reasons”—and its relationship to the development of intimacy, interiority, and individuality. His source material is the Book of Hours—a devotional assemblage for the laity, first compiled in the 13th century. The book included psalms, prayers, biblical passages, the calendar of saints’ days, the Office of the Dead, and other set texts, almost exclusively in Latin. These were intended to be recited in a whisper, largely in private, at each of the eight monastic “hours” into which each day’s worship was divided. Books of Hours were originally owned exclusively by the rich and largely by women (the books were commonly passed down from mother to daughter, and remained strongly associated with women throughout their history). By the late Middle Ages they had become by far the most widely used texts; the small volumes, often cupped in the hands, are a ubiquitous prop in medieval and Renaissance paintings, in which they serve as an immediately recognizable symbol of prayer and the internal life.

The study of Books of Hours was confined mostly to art historians—the finest volumes, sumptuously illuminated and hand-scripted, contain some of the supreme paintings of the late Middle Ages. But in a feat of inspired scholarship, Duffy has turned to the very features of these books that have rankled those who study them as works of art: the jottings in the margins and on the flyleaves made by their owners, hitherto regarded as defacements at worst and proof of provenance at best. He’s examined the marginalia of a small number of the extant Books of Hours made for English use (some 800 handwritten volumes survive, along with a few thousand early printed editions), and has discovered “a series of unexpected windows into the hearts and souls of the men and women who long ago had used these books to pray.”

It’s surprising that previous scholars didn’t use the Book of Hours as Duffy has, because, although he doesn’t discuss this in Marking the Hours, for decades historians have asserted rather than probed its social, spiritual, and even psychological significance. Medievalists have recognized that the Book of Hours—“a script for the drama of personal religion,” as Duffy nicely puts it—was linked to the broader movement toward introspective devotion, especially among prosperous women, following the Fourth Lateran Council (1215); the move was exemplified in the council’s decision to alter confession from a ceremony of public penance to a private dialogue, followed by private self-correction. Engaging in speculation as squishy as it is fascinating, some scholars have seen those developments as engendering, in turn, a deeper and more complex internal life and new conceptions of privacy among the educated laity. (That at once stimulating and exasperating monument of French medievalism, A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World, tantalizingly asserts that the habit of intimate and meditative prayer that the Book of Hours encouraged “profoundly influenced the most secret aspects of private life,” but, alas, fails to tell us how.)

Duffy largely eschews such speculation and instead concentrates on the nitty-gritty. The Book of Hours was in many cases its owner’s most expensive and most intimate possession, carried about tucked in a sleeve or belt. Although a deeply personal artifact, the book, soon grubby and well thumbed, was also shared—known as “the primer” in England, it was the primary volume children used in learning to read. Both the way the books were handled and the scribbles that filled them signified the permeability of the secular and religious life, especially among women (a point Mary Erler stresses in her Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England), and also the intermingling of the quotidian and the eternal, the individual and the communal, even the Christian and the pagan. One woman, in her marginalia, laments the destruction of a shrine and details the contents of her linen closet. The books are crammed with pressed flowers, recipes, notes on debts and rents due, charms and incantations, souvenirs of pilgrimages, affectionate messages from family members (the young Catherine Parr, the future queen, playfully jotted to her uncle, “Wen you do on thys loke / Pray you remember wo wrote thys in your boke”; it’s the equivalent of every bad yearbook rhyme), dates of marriages and deaths (“my moder departed to God”), and often very precise information about the times of births, to aid the casting of horoscopes. Moreover, these prayer books, a means to converse with God, testify to the vicissitudes of temporal power. Richard III’s book was taken at Bosworth Field; the victor, Henry VII, gave it to his mother, who scratched off Richard’s name and wrote her own on the flyleaf. A onetime devoted court friend of Catherine of Aragon blotted out the queen’s autograph after Henry VIII repudiated her.

Duffy is loath to draw overelaborate conclusions based on what he calls these “traces of lives.” Even if at times, confronted with the apparently modern sentiments these notes express, he feels as though the centuries between himself and the books’ owners had been “swallowed up,” he adheres to the approach advocated by the French medievalist Philippe Braunstein (whom he never mentions):

Anything that brings us closer to the intimate feelings of people who lived centuries ago tempts us to abolish the distance that stands between us and a lost world. The trap of modernity is to assume that nothing is ever new, that men expressing themselves in private speak the same language across the centuries.

Occasionally the books offer far more than a trace of that elusive quarry Duffy calls “the innermost thoughts and most sacred privacies of late medieval people.” While imprisoned in the Tower, awaiting his trial and eventual execution, Thomas More pored over and annotated his Book of Hours. Its remarkable survival (it was in private hands until 1929) allows us, as Duffy writes with forgivable hyperbole, to watch More “in the very act of praying.” Duffy’s scrupulous exegesis of More’s poignant notes about the verses in the psalms that captured his attention and of the prayer More wrote in the margins (“Gyve me thy grace good lord / To sett the world at nought …”) clearly shows a devout and isolated man using his Book of Hours in his struggle “to come to terms with a frightening fate.”

The Senses in Late Medieval England, by C. M. Woolgar (Yale), is another book that summons a lost world. Perceiving reality in ways profoundly different from the modern experience, the men and women of the late Middle Ages attached moral qualities to colors, sounds, tastes—even rocks—and they saw a bright red and a bright blue as more similar than a pale red and a bright red. In a triumph of historical empathy and imagination, Woolgar mines an array of English sources—household accounts; literary, artistic, and architectural works; archaeological evidence—and deploys the insights of anthropology and linguistics to illuminate aspects of daily medieval life and assess the religious, philosophical, material, and psychological forces that shaped the ways medieval people experienced their physical world. Yale University Press, the preeminent house for English medieval history, publishes both this and Duffy’s book, and both exemplify Yale’s remarkably intelligent and well-designed use of carefully reproduced, incisively annotated illustrations.

Woolgar could have lapsed into the flighty and speculative, but he uses the same sober, almost materialist method, anchored in what he calls “a history of the day-to-day,” that served him well in The Great Household in Late Medieval England—a book in which he married an exquisitely detailed description of the daily life of the gentry and nobility to an analysis of the social and material forces that influenced it over time. With a precision born of his curatorial training, a dexterous imagination, a sensitive weighing of often-confusing and generally sparse evidence, and a conscientious effort to abjure the condescension of posterity, Woolgar allows the reader to enter an intensely alien mentality.

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.